The Big Picture
Kevin Costner’s directorial debut,
Dances With Wolves
was followed up with his second directorial effort,
The Postman
.
Costner scored the lead role in The Postman due to his performance in Field of Dreams, which impressed the author David Brin and his wife.
The Postman faced production issues, negative reception, and poor box office results.
Kevin Costner and the Western seem to go hand in hand. His directorial debut, Dances With Wolves, nabbed seven Oscars and cemented him as a rising filmmaker, while Yellowstone revitalized his career. Now Costner looks to repeat the process with Horizon: An American Saga, the first of four films in his Western epic series. But Costner has had his fair share of film flameouts, and the biggest might be The Postman. Based on the novel of the same name by David Brin, The Postman takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. Costner’s titular Postman ends up traveling the country and spreading a message of hope, all while wearing a postman’s uniform. But if The Postman carried a positive message, Costner’s actions behind the scenes were anything but peaceful.
‘The Postman’s Author Handpicked Kevin Costner for the Lead Role
Image via Warner Bros.
Costner ended up scoring the lead role in The Postman due to another beloved entry in his film career, and that film was none other than Field of Dreams. Brin and his wife chose Costner after a screening of the film, as they felt he embodied all the core traits of the Postman. “As we emerged, she turned to me and said, ‘That’s him. He’s the one,'” Brin wrote on his personal website. “Of course she meant Kevin Costner — her choice as the right man to portray Gordon, the hero of my novel. What could I say in response, except ‘Honey, we’d never be that lucky!'” They actually did wind up being that lucky, as Costner soon signed on to star in The Postman when it entered production.
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Costner would further endear himself in Brin’s eyes by reworking the script that Eric Roth had turned in. Roth apparently went “out of his way to reverse every moral point” of the original novel, according to Brin, so Costner and Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale) wrote a script that returned to Brin’s more hopeful outlook on a post-apocalyptic society. A key example is the final fight between the postman and General Bethlehem (Will Patton), who leads a militaristic cult. The postman challenges Bethlehem to a fistfight, and after defeating him, chooses to spare his life… even though Bethlehem had what was left of the United States in an iron grip. Brin would further expand on his desire to shy away from the usual tropes that accompany dystopia:
“Most post-holocaust novels are little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules…In fact, such lonely ‘heroes’ would vanish like soot after a real apocalypse. The moral of
The Postman
is that if we lost our civilization, we’d all come to realize how much we missed it, and would realize what a miracle it is simply to get your mail every day.”
Brin’s outlook is decidedly refreshing (especially when dystopian fables seem to be the genre du jour in film and television) and Costner’s willingness to embrace the source material remains a rarity. But even though Costner was determined to bring The Postman to the big screen, he ended up butting heads with Warner Bros.
Kevin Costner Missed Out on a Role That Went to Harrison Ford
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Prior to The Postman, Costner was still dealing with the fallout from his other post-apocalyptic Waterworld. Not only did Waterworld turn out to be one of the most costly movies in Hollywood history, but it was also riddled with production disasters that ranged from injured actors to tsunamis. Waterworld also led to Costner’s star dimming, but he still locked horns with Warner Bros. while filming The Postman, especially when it came to the runtime. The final cut of The Postman clocks in at a whopping 177 minutes, and despite two test screenings that ended in a negative reception, Costner refused to trim down the runtime. He also funded most of The Postman himself, with the total budget coming out to $80 million. The box office receipts totaled around $20 million.
But the biggest misfire Costner might have made was turning down another role to bring The Postman to life. He was slated to star in Air Force One, but eventually turned it down to direct The Postman. Harrison Ford later revealed that he took the lead role of James Marshall because Costner recommended him to the producers. “Kevin knew this was a big commercial movie and his schedule didn’t allow him to do it. And he told [the producers] he would let it go only if I could do it,” Ford told the Los Angeles Times.
Kevin Costner Is Still Proud of ‘The Postman’
To this day, The Postman is still regarded as one of the weaker films in Costner’s career, and it’s not hard to see why. The end product is a meandering, heavy-handed affair that severely underutilizes a talented cast including Larenz Tate and Olivia Williams. Costner’s Postman also feels too bland to make an impact. As a result, his romance with Williams’ Abby falls flat, while his rivalry with Bethlehem lacks the fury of other, more compelling cinematic clashes. It’s not a good sign when Rolling Stone labeled The Postman as one of the “50 Worst Decisions in Movie History.” But Costner remains proud of the work he did on The Postman, and even told the Huffington Post that there’s one change he would have made to improve the final film:
I always thought I probably started it wrong. I should have said something like ‘once upon a time.’ Because it was just like a modern-day fairy tale — it wraps itself up with a storybook ending with the statue. You know, I thought it was a pretty funny movie set against the idea of a Superman — somebody stepping up. But in this case, it’s a very humble guy who’s nothing but a liar [laughs] — delivers mail and burns half of it just to stay alive.
The Postman is an example of an artist’s worst tendencies as an actor/director, as Costner stubbornly went ahead with his vision despite the negative reception to his initial cut of the film and the fallout from Waterworld. Reviews and box office tracking for Horizon indicate that history may repeat itself, but hope springs eternal that Costner can recapture the magic of Dances With Wolves.
The Postman is available to rent on Prime Video.
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